Mahila Sanghas as Feminist Groups

Abstract

With increasing focus on the place of women in development by multilateral agencies, donor countries and non-governmental organisations, various strategies of intervention are employed. One such intervention results in poor illiterate women in Orissa, redefining their position in contrast to the dominant discourses and gender ideology of state, religion and economy, to over come culturally enshrined powerlessness. From the observation of the work of the People's Rural Education Movement (PREM), and the women's organisations and credit unions they support and foster it is clear that such women's groups are appropriately understood as feminist in that they have claimed the right to speak for themselves (and those with whom they are attempting to change the social order); conceptualised an alternative social order and defined for themselves alternative social, political and economic activities within it; are challenging the mass of constructed ideas, values and myths around their gender; and are also challenging the social construction of male-female dualism and the ways in which it is reinforced. Their activities are considered in terms of Kristeva's three tiers of feminist thought: liberal feminism, radical feminism and symbolic-order post-structural feminism.